Stage and Characteristics / Center
Emergent
•  Children use environmental print to help identify words.
•  Children are just beginning to be aware that there is a relationship between letters and sounds.
•  Use activities that build on phonemic awareness.
Beginning
•  A move from pretending to read to actually being able to read as they match sounds and letters.
•  Common for Ss to vocalize the letter sounds as they read aloud, to finger-point while reading aloud, and to read slowly in a word-by-word manner (Bear et al., 2004).
•  This stage of spelling usually finds children just starting to understand beginning and ending sounds and spelling phonetically (Bear et al., 2004).
Transitional
•  The transitional stage usually begins around second grade as children begin to decode commonly recurring letter patterns as units (Ehri and McCormick, 2004).
•  Children at this stage are said to be at the consolidated-alphabetic stage as their focus shifts to spelling patterns, which might include onsets, rimes, and syllables.
•  In the corresponding stage of spelling development, within-word pattern spelling, children are able to consolidate single-letter sounds into patterns or chunks, and words with regular spelling patterns are internalized (Bear et al, 2004).
Intermediate
•  The intermediate stage finds children still in the consolidated alphabet stage (Ehri and McCormick, 2004), but they also move into an awareness of syllables and affixes (i.e., prefixes, suffixes, and other types of inflectional endings) (Bear et al., 2004).
•  These children can read faster silently than they can orally, and they can spell most single-syllable words correctly.
Advanced
•  Readers and writers at the advanced stage, or automatic stage, of word reading have “highly developed automaticity and speed in identifying unfamiliar as well as familiar words” (Ehri and McCormick, 2004, p. 384).
•  A characteristic of proficient readers is that they read accurately and recognize words automatically (Kuhn and Stahl, 2004).
•  The corresponding stage of spelling development is known as the stage of derivational relations, because children understand that they can derive related words from a basic root word by adding prefixes and suffixes (Bear et al., 2004).